My HP 2100 experience

Specifications

Basic impressions

I am essentially happy with my purchase. The Laptop is a little heavy and the battery gets chewed quickly by the Athlon processor. It came preinstalled with MS Windows XP Home. Even in Windoze with HP's presets, the battery gets eaten quickly. This is not a good candidate for long-haul flights without an external power source!

The XP2400+ gives the laptop a lot of processing grunt. However, the 320M AGP tends to be on the slow side in comparison with desktop systems. Toms Hardware pretty much sums up the AGP 320M performance. In essence, the memory performance is poor. The graphics card, while a Radeon, runs off only a single rendering pipeline. I have found 3D games like Quake Arena to be quite playable on XP even so. Given the low price of the machine, the graphics engine is a great bonus! The preinstalled WLAN was also a real bonus. I managed to scrounge the laptop on a special and paid no more than I would have for a laptop without WiFi.

More details on the Mobility Radeon can be found on Toms Hardware. Unfortunately, the graphics engine uses conventional RAM so I found that the computer was doing a lot of swapping to disk because on average 64MB of RAM was being used by the graphics card when running XP Home. I decided to splash out and purchased a further 512MB DDR stick from MemoryX. It was a good purchase. The machine now swaps a lot less and is visibly faster in XP.

Linux installation

Mandrake installation

I installed Mandrake 9.2 Professional onto the laptop. I resized the Windoze NTFS partition by halving its size using the expert mode in the Mandrake partitioning module during its install. The resizing worked perfectly. However, you may wish to defrag your NTFS partition in windoze first to get the info in the first part of the disk or you may be prevented from getting a decent chunk of available space. I then repartitioned the remaining space for linux (ext3) and swap.

I found that pcmcia support did not work and hanged the machine. As I have no pcmcia cards, I rebooted and did an interactive startup by ESCaping from the splash screen and pressing 'i' for interactive startup when requested. I then answered No to loading PCMCIA. In the Control Panel, I then removed pcmcia as a service that is started. To date I have not tried to reenable PCMCIA support as I do not need it.

Unfortunately, Mandrake installs without ACPI support. Removing acpi=off from the lilo.conf file caused my machine to hang in the initial kernel bootstrap. I ran without acpi for a while, but the machine ran hot and noisily. The battery life was also substantially reduced from XP (to just over an hour).

The modem is a winmodem. I have not tried to get it going. It certainly does not install automatically using Mandrake's install. XFree does install out of the box using Mandrake but only with 2D support.

The sound system installs perfectly. The Ethernet NIC and Wireless worked perfectly first time.

Recompiling the kernel

I removed acpi=off from the boot image in lilo.conf, reran lilo and rebooted.

ACPI!

I use a little X utility for monitoring battery life and temperature called wmpower (I found it on Freshmeat).

Bits 'n pieces

Software Suspend works 100% for me. Mandrake installs a package called suspend-scripts. If I run /usr/bin/pmsuspend2, my system copies the RAM to the swap space and shuts down fine. It also restarts without any problems.

Unfortunately, XFree does not install with the 3D capability that it should. An article has been written explaining that to get Accelerated 3D support, XFree has to be compiled from the CVS with a patch and a 2.6.0 kernel must be compiled. I have not been brave enough to give that a go as yet. I am not in any hurry for 3D support at present so it may wait a while.

Conclusion

If you need to get hold of me, I can be contacted at:
spam2 @ @ instruform dot com